


canis major.

by nuest95s



Category: Wanna One (Band)
Genre: Childhood Friends, Fantasy, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Magical Realism, Mutual Pining, Slow Burn, minhyun is literally a star
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-14
Updated: 2018-08-14
Packaged: 2019-06-26 15:00:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15665577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nuest95s/pseuds/nuest95s
Summary: Seongwoo isn’t sure how to explain how he shines on Earth—bright, searing white and an aftertaste of divinity and warmth that burns into a lingering chill—so he doesn’t.





	canis major.

**Author's Note:**

> work [playlist](https://open.spotify.com/user/varsh-bear/playlist/2Eci8mz47fmSgzIfhWccF6?si=E1vy9NbzT4eVG1U5AzGBXg) here!!
> 
> sidenote: the title is the name of a constellation which sirius is a part of!! it's the brightest sky in the night sky and yes minhyun is sirius in this... it's also known as 'the scorcher' which may provide other bg/context
> 
> warnings: mentions of underage alcohol use and brief weed use b/w "But he convinces him once" and "Seongwoo rubs his eyes" (after this, they're still high but it's not spoken abt/obvious but end of entire scene is @ "It's better like this")
> 
> special thanks to kaya and emily for helping beta and shad for making sure i didnt just abandon it halfway through <3

        The boy falls from the sky on a Tuesday. Seongwoo is used to this—the act, not the object.

        The first time, he was two years old. His mother held him tight and he wailed as the sky turned above them. Blue churned into black; death spit out life spit out something new and extraordinary and hard edged. Impossibilities rained down around them—shooting stars in the distance, miracles too far away to believe. A pebble fell at his mother’s feet, and she rubbed a thumb over the smooth gray stone before leaving it behind. To her, it was just a rock. Seongwoo knew better, even then.

        From then on, it became commonplace. A faded note floats in from the window when he isn’t looking; a dying couch bangs against the side of his grandfather’s barn while he’s staying the night; his father finds a still warm toaster in his duffel bag. But the rocks never stop—some of them glow, and some of them burn, and some of them smell of roses and rainwater. He keeps them in a box under his bed and prays he never forgets.

        When he’s five, he decides he never will.

        It’s a Tuesday, and the moon turns everything to silver-spun whispers. The air sings an old carol as it tangles through the trees, and when white gold streaks across the sky, Seongwoo thinks, for a moment, that it’s a Christmas miracle.

        But there is no one to welcome this star to earth, no one worth anything. Seongwoo runs his hands through the long grass and watches the heavens touch the ground for a fraction of a second. It’s different this time. Burnt sugar stings his nostrils; across the field, the smoke does not fade.

        He shakes his head once, at his own stupidity or his own hesitance, and pushes through the grass. The smoke grows thicker and the wind whips around them—singing, singing, weeping.

        The smoke dissipates—the fire scatters in the breeze, too bright to be believable. Around him, there is nothing but stone and ash. He is curled tight enough that his nudity is hard to discern; stardust and soot streak him in thick swatches.

        He opens his eyes, and Seongwoo takes a step back. His mind is a tangle of held breaths and promises to himself— _don’t forget, don’t forget, don’t forget._

        The boy backs himself up against the crater and pulls his knees up. Even now, Seongwoo knows that he is not like the toaster, or the sofa, or the garden gnome. He glows, and burns, and smells of sky and of death.

        He holds his stare for long enough—there is a detached kind of caution in his eyes. The warmth of a fire right before it burns. In the distance, Seongwoo hears a handful of shouts. He glances over his shoulder—his sister waves at him frantically.

        When he looks back, the boy is gone.

++

 

        They see each other again in second grade. The sky is darker these days—Seongwoo thinks that maybe he took the stars with him when he fell.

        The window is open, and a breeze blows a small iridescent pebble onto his desk. Seongwoo takes it in two fingers and rubs the smooth rock.

        “We have a new student,” the teacher announces cheerfully. Seongwoo tosses the pebble into the air and catches it when it falls. “Honey, why don’t you introduce yourself?”

        When he speaks, Seongwoo looks up. His voice holds that night in it, carries a hint of burnt sugar and ash tucked away where only Seongwoo can find it. There is something charmingly juvenile about the line of his face, something meticulously _human_ about the smoothness of his expression.

        But his eyes still burn. Seongwoo puts the pebble down and waits. Quietly, he says, “Hi, I’m Hwang Minhyun. Nice to meet you all.”

        He bobs a brief bow and follows the teacher to a seat behind Seongwoo. The boy—Minhyun—waits until she leaves, and then pushes a folded note onto the back of his desk. It reminds him of the pebble, for some reason.

       

        _meet me on the blacktop at lunch._

 

Seongwoo isn’t sure why he follows through with it. He could’ve eaten instead—read a book, ran away. At the very least, Minhyun scares him.

        He still goes.

        Minhyun dangles his legs over the edge of the rock wall. The air smells faintly of tanbark and warm plastic. Seongwoo takes a seat beside him and wraps his arms around himself.  “You wanted to talk to me?”

        Minhyun tilts his head and takes him in. His skin is—cleaner, and he’s wearing clothes, and his hair is just a little longer than he remembers it being. But he still glows, somehow. There is something of the stars in him, and Seongwoo, closer to them than most humans, knows this.

        “I did,” he says, in his perfunctory, childish voice. “I wanted to say thank you.”

        “For what?” This is a rhetorical question addressed to the night sky. Minhyun no longer applies, so he doesn’t answer, and simply holds his gaze. Seongwoo heaves a long sigh, and passes a hand over the back of his neck. Hesitance curls its way around his frame. “You’re not—You’re not like—”

        Minhyun stares, and Seongwoo thinks that, maybe, somewhere, something bright is coming into existence.

        He bites his lip, then grounds himself. “You’re not human, are you?”

        The other boy smiles. It is less a smile than it is a twist of the mouth—a grin that he caught too late. He shakes his head, and Seongwoo sighs again, but this time the breath is pulled from him, agonizingly slow.

        “Then what are you?” he asks. The words slide from his mouth easily now, crowded up against each other. Impossibilities are harder to believe when they have a beating heart, but now that he _knows,_ everything seems to slide into place. “An angel? An asteroid? An _alien?”_

Minhyun scrunches up his nose, a little more at each new accusation, before finally tumbling into laughter. Seongwoo breaks off, because divinity lives in that laugh. He shakes his head. “No.”

        The answer hangs between them. _A star. A boy that is a star, or a star that is a boy, or a pocket of ash and light and a single infant’s cry._ Minhyun inclines his head in the slightest hint of a nod, but Seongwoo isn’t sure what he’s answering.

        “Thank you,” he says again. It sounds different, from a star.

        That afternoon, Minhyun leaves with a woman that Seongwoo recognizes—an old neighbor of his. He cocks his head at her, and youth stains his words. “Are you his guardian?”

        He’s not entirely sure that’s the correct use of the word, but dictionaries rarely lie. She blinks at him and crosses her arms. “No, I’m his mom. Are you two friends?”

        Are they? Seongwoo glances at Minhyun, already inching towards the parking lot. Something that feels a lot like warmth and a lot like longing takes up residence between his lungs. He nods, emphatic.

        Seongwoo hesitates for a second more, and then catches up with Minhyun. He toes a pile of gravel with his sneakers. He catches his breath, and then says, “Do stars have mothers?”

        Minhyun lifts his shoulders in a shrug. “I’d guess so.”

        “Not human mothers, though.”

        He grins, all white tipped mischief. “I’d guess not.”

        Before he can question him further, his neighbor drags him away. Minhyun waves at him from the back window, and, for some reason, he waves back.

       

++

 

        They learn each other, slowly. Minhyun learns humanity, and Seongwoo learns him—on cloudy nights, Minhyun tells him stories about a world brighter and more beautiful than theirs. He looks up at the sad night sky, smog passing over faded constellations, and Seongwoo knows he still belongs to that faraway place.

        But he stays. He’s not sure why, or how, but he does.

        Seongwoo asks him about everything—about who he is, and where he came from, and whether stardust runs through his veins and colors his tears. Minhyun humors him, at first, but there is more to life than shooting stars and bright eyed interrogation. Seongwoo feels otherwise, but agrees anyway.

        They come up with the list in the treehouse, an old, rickety structure on the fringes of the field where they first met. It’s far enough away from town that no one finds them, and close enough that no one tries. Seongwoo decorates it with posters of space, and Minhyun decorates it with newspaper clippings of mundane achievements.

        Minhyun writes them out on a piece of poster board, pausing between sentences of spidery script to double check the rules with Seongwoo.

 

        _Minhyun and Seongwoo’s Rules About Questions_

  1. __Seongwoo can only ask one question daily about where Minhyun came from.__
  2. _Minhyun can only ask one question daily about how humans work, unless it’s an emergency._
  3. _They can save up questions to ask at the end of a week or month or year. Weekly questions happen on Sunday and monthly ones on the last day and yearly ones on October 31_ _st_ _._
  4. _They can pass on questions if they really want to, but have to provide a reason why._



 

        They hang it on the back door. Minhyun is unpredictable with his questions—sometimes, he’ll ask two months’ worth of questions in between passing period. Sometimes, he’ll text him one at 3 A.M., with his mother’s phone. Seongwoo can’t understand what about humanity intrigues him.

        Minhyun doesn’t come to his house, in the beginning. He comes up to his bedroom for the first time on an autumn afternoon. They’d just had cookies downstairs—for some reason, his entire family had simply accepted his presence. Seongwoo’s not sure how someone so bright could ever blend in, but his mother’s glazed over expression brooks no argument on that front.

        Minhyun collapses on his bed and bounces on it twice, contemplative. Seongwoo hangs in the doorway, a stranger in his own room. The other boy hangs over the edge of the bed and makes a confused noise before pulling out a small black box. “This yours?”

        Seongwoo hides his blush behind gruff words. “Yeah.”

        He brushes his thumb against the paper cover and opens it. Something raw and weary sharpens his gaze. “Where’d you find these?”

        He shrugs, straightening himself up. It shouldn’t be embarrassing, to admit impossibility to something that is impossible, but it still is. “They find me.”

        Minhyun blinks at him, human and yet _apart._ “What?”

        “They, like—” he wrinkles his nose. “Things fall from the sky around me. Like—I don’t know. They just do. Like you.”

        Curiosity colors Minhyun’s expression for a fraction of a second, and he opens his mouth only to close it. “I’ll ask you on the 31st.”

        He sticks his tongue out, and Minhyun reciprocates. He rolls over on the bed and glances up at his posters. “Why d’you like the stars so much?”

        The truth is that Seongwoo hadn’t always cared about them. The magic of the rocks faded quickly, and the junk was a nuisance at best. That night, that Christmas, changed it. Magic had sung through the air and had sung through them, and it was hard, after, to look at the night sky with anything less than reverence. Sometimes, he has nightmares about it—nightmares that feel dangerously like dreams. They’re hard to remember when he wakes; all he can pull away are glimpses—the fading odor of burnt sugar and a hastily drawn landscape in the distance, all harsh lines of smoke and stardust.

        Minhyun is still waiting for an answer, but Seongwoo is no longer there, lost in the vestiges of a night that haunts him, only him. Minhyun reaches over and nudges him slightly. His fingers are warm to the touch, and his gaze is warmer.

        Minhyun still lives in that world, sometimes, but he longs to live here. Seongwoo’s not sure where he wants to live, except that he’d prefer it be with him.

        “I don’t know,” he lies carefully. Artifice leaves his mouth tasting bitter; Minhyun looks away and back at the posters.

        “They’re beautiful,” he says, after a while. “They _are._ But it’s nice down here too, you know. There’s more.”

        Seongwoo waits for him to elaborate, but he doesn’t. Finally, he lies down beside him and blows out a long sigh. Minhyun glances at him sideways but doesn’t say anything. “I think they’re more beautiful on Earth.”

        There’s something unsaid in that, maybe. But youth makes it cloudy and unreadable—they leave it be.

 

++

               

        Seongwoo always saves his questions up. Spending Halloween with Minhyun is far more fun than trick or treating; they arrange snacks at different corners of the treehouse and wait for the sun to go down before they start. Seongwoo’s always thought Minhyun looks brighter in moonlight. Maybe it’s a side effect of the starriness. The celestiality. One of those isn’t a word, and he’s not sure which.

        Today, though, they start early. Seongwoo sits on the edge of the hatch and watches sunlight cast the fields in amber washed gold while Minhyun tidies up. They’d already cleaned up that morning, but he’d read somewhere that dust can accumulate in less than an hour.

        Seongwoo doesn’t realize Minhyun’s done until he joins him on the crowded opening. He’s warm against him, always is. Seongwoo had always assumed that the stars were cold, but the fire has to come from somewhere.

        “So,” he says, swinging his arms by his sides. “What are you?”

        It’s a relatively open ended question, which works to his advantage. He takes a bite of banana and answers with a full mouth, “Human.”

        Minhyun wrinkles his nose. “You know what I mean. Like, the rocks. Are you some kind of… attract-y thing?”

        “Beacon,” he supplies, matter of fact, through another bite of banana. He’d only found the word when trying to categorize his own abilities, but Minhyun doesn’t need to know that.  

        The other boy snaps his fingers. “Yeah! A beacon for, like, stars and starry things. Things that don’t belong in the sky anymore.”

        There’s something strange about the way he says that, and it sets him apart, again. It’s hard to forget, at times like this, how different they are. How much it matters. Finally, he nods. “I guess.”

        His brow furrows, but he doesn’t ask anything further. Seongwoo takes the opportunity to pull his notepad from an open crate. He rifles through the yellowing pages until he gets to the beginning of the questions for this year. At first, he asked personal questions, logistical ones. The meaning of his existence, the reason he’d fallen, how he’d fallen, where he’d come from—Minhyun had answered them quietly, eyes just barely shut.

        But there was no point in putting together a story that no longer mattered—a past that had long been forgotten. Seongwoo leans against the side of the crate, away from Minhyun, and asks, “What does it feel like? To shine?”

        Minhyun closes his eyes and curls his fingers into fists. He holds his breath for a very long time and lets it go slowly. When he finally opens them, when he finally speaks, everything about him is very still. “Colder—than you’d think.” His lips are parted in a half forgotten cry of pain, and after an indeterminable amount of time, he continues, “It’s—I miss it, sometimes.”

        Seongwoo isn’t sure how to explain how he shines on Earth— _bright, searing white and an aftertaste of divinity and warmth that burns into a lingering chill_ —so he doesn’t.

        They wait for the regret in the air to pass—Seongwoo hands him a piece of popcorn from the bowl on the edge of the table. Minhyun chews it thoughtfully and looks out at the field. From here, everything looks beautiful and foreign in its beauty. They could be far, far away, watching this from behind a television screen. But the fading warmth of the sun is harder to discredit.

        Minhyun looks over at him, and the sunlight turns his already tan skin aureate. Hair hangs low over his eyes, but his fragmented gaze, smooth as it is, betrays a hint of hesitation. Quietly, he says, “Does that mean… one day… another person might fall for you?”

        Seongwoo chokes on what remains of his banana. It’s not his fault—Minhyun’s getting to understand all these things, but the nuances of language sometimes evade him. He stares at the browning grass far below to avoid making eye contact with him. “What do you mean?”

        He waves a dismissive hand, petulant and impatient. “What if another star-person-thing falls to earth for you? Like I did?”

        Seongwoo swallows the banana and nods, slowly. “Yeah, I guess that could happen.”

        Minhyun doesn’t say anything for a long moment, and it stretches between them, waiting. It takes up more space every second that goes by, and by the time he speaks, the dusty treehouse feels suffocating. “Well, I hope it doesn’t. You’re _my_ human.”

        He says this decisively, with a hint of puerile frivolity. But he looks over at him then, and holds his gaze carefully, searching.

        Seongwoo takes his hand, and he relaxes, just slightly. He exhales the words he’s never able to say to him, and hands him the bowl of popcorn. They go down the list until the moon comes up and goes down and the air smells of long forgotten miracles and butter. Minhyun falls asleep when the sun comes up, and Seongwoo gives up on the sunrise in favor of looking at him.

 

++

       

        Minhyun shines. He always has, and it comes as a surprise to no one when they enter high school and his biggest worry shifts from the miracles and tragedies that hang above them unspoken to digging love letters out of his half open backpack before exams. Seongwoo is not surprised but he’s—he’s not sure what it is. A halfhearted, sharp edged kind of dissatisfaction, a dragging ache that he takes out at night and never seems to be able to understand. He doesn’t tell Minhyun about it because—he’ll figure it out, one day, and then he’ll tell him, but. Not now. It’ll make things weird.

        He dates a lot, because he’s never able to say no. Seongwoo begins to step in for him, vetting his possible relationship candidates before they go out with him. It’s stupid, and childish, and painful in a simple way, scraping your knee and watching the blood drip on the pavement for minutes at a time. But he still does it. It’s… weird.

        There is very little Minhyun cannot do, and most of these things are easily attributable to the fact that he had never been taught them, as well as the matter of his inhumanity. Minhyun can’t tie a tie, even after he watches the instructional videos that Seongwoo sends him ten times over.

        So this is how it happens—it’s the Winter Ball, and Seongwoo’s plans had been to stay home and do his physics homework and read a book he’d just bought on dark matter. But he has responsibilities, duties, so he drives over in his sister’s shitty old Volkswagen Beetle and just manages to park outside Minhyun’s house without crashing. Technically, this is illegal, but technically, Minhyun should be dissected alive in a government lab. It’s been a long time since Seongwoo’s paid attention to legalities.

        Seongwoo knocks twice, and is greeted only by faint shouting from upstairs. He tries the knob, and finds it already unlocked.

        A pop song is blaring out the window, and when he nudges the door open, Minhyun’s sat on his bed with a ball of fabric in his hands. It loops around his wrists, twice. He bites back a small laugh. “Did you just tie yourself up with that?”

        He glares up at him. “I was—I was trying, okay. I almost made it, I swear, but—” he breaks off, helpless, and deflates. There’s something unbearably piteous about that, and Seongwoo’s mouth curves in a small smile. To the student body, maybe, he’s beautiful and unattainable and plainly _other_ , but to him, he’s still Minhyun.

        It’s heartening, to know that they can still have this.

        “Seongwoo?” Minhyun’s left hand is hovering over the play button for the instructional video, but he’s looking up at him. “Everything okay?”

        He shakes his head. “Yeah, I was just—nothing. Hold still.”

        He does. The music is annoyingly upbeat in the background, too loud to ignore and quiet enough that it doesn’t drown out the crickets chirping outside. Seongwoo messes up twice undoing the knots around his wrist, and swears under his breath.

        Minhyun laughs, soft to the point of being nearly inaudible, and he looks up. “What?”

        His lip quirks to the side, something sad and pensive curving his expression. “Nothing. How do you know how to tie ties?”

        Seongwoo unwinds the fabric from his left wrist. “An uncle’s wedding, when I was younger. I practiced, in case—I don’t know. In case this happened.”

        “Maybe you’re psychic.”

        He glances up and catches his eye, offers a small, weary grin. “Or maybe you’re just hopeless.”

        Minhyun smiles, and he follows Seongwoo’s movements with his eyes. “Yeah. Maybe.”

        “When’s Jonghyun coming around?” he asks, to fill the silence. He barely remembers the name. Before Jonghyun, it was Soyoung, and before that, it was Euigeon. He thinks it was Euigeon—it’s impossible to keep track of all the people he goes out with. But someone has to do it, and it’s unlikely Minhyun will.

        He makes a considering noise and shifts on the bed. Seongwoo slides the fabric off his right wrist and waits. “I don’t know. Half an hour?”

        It’s enough time that he can finish the tie and get something to eat before leaving. He loops the fabric around Minhyun’s neck and tries to ignore Minhyun staring at him. His gaze is heavy on him, scrutinizing yet ambiguous in intent. He pauses, and sighs. “Is there anything you want to say?”

        He means it to come out casual, but it doesn’t quite make it there. Seongwoo wonders, for a brief moment, what would’ve happened if he’d asked Minhyun out to the Ball instead of relaying Jonghyun’s request. What would’ve happened if he’d written him a love letter—what would’ve happened if he’d told him when he still could.

        Seongwoo wonders what would happen if he kissed him.

        The fabric hangs limp around his neck, and the side of his hand brushes the edge of Minhyun’s collarbone. He’s unbearably warm, the way he always is, and Seongwoo thinks nothing of it.

        A knock comes from downstairs, and they jump apart. Seongwoo sits back on his heels and waits for his heart to slow while Minhyun fingers the half done tie dolefully. He stares at the tie, then at him, before reaching back up to finish it.

        Minhyun shines, and no one knows this as well as he does. They go downstairs and Seongwoo takes pictures of him and Jonghyun and swallows the tepid, lingering burn in his throat. He sends them off in Jonghyun’s BMW and waits for the lights to disappear in the distance and when he’s sure they’re gone, he finds Mrs. Hwang’s liquor cabinet and pours himself a glass of wine to keep himself still.

        He hides the keys to the Volkswagen in a potted plant and calls his sister to take him home. For once, she doesn’t complain.

 

++

 

        Every year, Minhyun is a little more interested in humanity, and every year, Seongwoo finds it harder to sympathize with him.

        His parents get a divorce in the middle of sophomore year, and tell him and his sister over Christmas dinner. In a way, he’s relieved. The past two years had been a constant struggle between holding his breath and tuning out everything that happened in between.

        But he’s also not relieved. He’s also—he’s not sure. But the sick wrongness of it all closes in around him, and he can’t help but wonder what the hell Minhyun sees in humanity except for the capacity for error. That’s all they seem to be good at—fucking things up.

        He wants to tell Minhyun this. He wants to tell Minhyun a lot of things, but he doesn’t. Every day that goes by, the outline of these unsaid statements makes itself clear above them, waiting.

        Minhyun’s closer to human, these days. When they’d been younger, he’d waved his hands in careless circles at night and waited for the stars to obey him and pouted when they hadn’t. Now, he jams his hands in his pockets and reads Seongwoo passages of their textbooks when he can’t sleep at night. Still the same, but less _other._ Still him, but more human.

        His parents get in a fight, right after dinner, and something dark and expansive tightens around his heart. So he sends Minhyun a brief text and hides himself in the shoe closet and waits.

        He’s good at waiting. _Fuck,_ he thinks. Fuck.

        Seongwoo types out a quick message telling him it’s fine and that he doesn’t have to come over, and hovers his thumb over the send button before deleting it in its entirety. He slips his phone back in his pocket, and a faint honking sound comes from outside.

        “He’s here, Seongwoo!” His sister calls from upstairs, only for him. It hurts a little, for some reason, the familiarity of it. He pulls on a threadbare hoodie and throws himself out the front door and runs down the lawn.

        Minhyun is sitting in his mother’s old Honda with one hand on the steering wheel and another on the old radio. He looks up when Seongwoo climbs in and offers a small, worn smile. “Hey.”

 _I’m in love with you,_ he thinks. Confessions bloom into existence and disappear at the last possible moment. Words crowd in his throat and he thinks, _I’m in love with you, I’m in love with you, I’m in love with you._

        It’s different, being in love with the stars, and being in love with _a_ star. The sky is too far away to touch but even now, Seongwoo can feel the warmth of Minhyun’s body heat between them. They’re different, and they’re both impossible, and to someone like him, this should not matter as much as it does.

        He takes another shaky breath and stares down the street, at rugged asphalt milky from the streetlights.

        Seongwoo wants to say this to him. Instead, he blurts, “My parents got a divorce. And they fought and—it was bad.”

        He feels lame, and small, and distinctly _not enough_ beside Minhyun. Flawed; pockmarked and insignificant. He wonders whether Minhyun ever wishes that he’d fallen for someone else—whether there is anyone else in the world like him.

        Minhyun takes his hand and he starts, an exhale hanging back in his throat. He doesn’t want to look over, but he forces himself. He opens his mouth to say something—double edged worry swirls in his eyes—and closes it in the next moment. Finally, he releases his hand and leans back against his seat. “Do you want to get ice cream?”

        “I’m lactose intolerant.”

        Minhyun knows this, and he also knows that Seongwoo doesn’t often care. He holds his gaze for a few seconds more, careful. There’s something unbearably compassionate about his expression. Seongwoo can barely breathe.

        He exhales, slowly. “Okay. I just—Okay. You’re paying, though.”

        Minhyun smiles but doesn’t say anything more. He watches him the entire way there, brief glances at stop signs that scrape across his skin. Seongwoo wants to ask him why. He wants to ask him a lot of questions these days, but none of them are about the stars anymore, so he never does.

        Watered down neon lights streak Minhyun in pale color, and he remembers the night they first met, all those years ago. He gives a brief, humorless laugh. “Today’s the anniversary.”

        Minhyun glances over, brows knit in confusion. “What?”

        “Eleven years since we first met,” Seongwoo says softly, and stares at the thin gray sky above them. He glances over at him, and sees himself mirrored in the mixture of sadness and nostalgia in Minhyun’s eyes. He laughs again, and it’s worse, somehow, than the first time. “God, can you believe it?”

        He shakes his head, wonder slowing his movements. There’s something quiet and abstruse about him tonight; the downturned curve of his mouth gives nothing away, and Seongwoo has never known anything about him except what he has given him.

        He doesn’t give him much, these days.

        “Do you regret it? Falling?” he asks, before he can regret it.

        Minhyun glances over at him, and surprise turns him alien. The light goes green and he tugs his gaze back to the road. But his movements are still stiff, still—clenched. Finally, he says, “No.”

        “Why not?”

        He throws him a sideways look, careful melancholy sharpening his features. It’s—delicate. Something about this is delicate—either it’s his expression, or it’s that transient ache that lies between them. He can feel the cracked glass all around them, but it’s not yet broken.   

        Not yet.

        Minhyun heaves a sigh and looks away. He scrubs his free hand over his face before returning it to the wheel. His voice, when he speaks, is lighthearted in an obvious kind of way. He turns right, and says, “I came here to see something new, I think. And I have.” His eyes flicker over to Seongwoo, for a fraction of a second, and he adds, “I wouldn’t have met you, if I’d stayed up there. So yeah, I don’t.”

        Seongwoo swallows hard. There is little to look at but the stars and Minhyun, and each reminds him of the other. But he stares up at the night sky anyway, a near black expanse broken up by sparkling white. He can almost see it again, in his mind’s eye. White gold streaks and burnt sugar smoke and an ashen kind of birth.

        He sees it, and then he looks over and sees Minhyun. He’s not looking at him now; they’ve parked in front of the ice cream parlor, and he has one elbow on the car door and his left palm pressed against his cheek. He looks up at the sky, the way he always does and yet endlessly different.

        Seongwoo opens his window, and a small rock falls from the sky. It bounces on the clear glass and into his lap. Minhyun drags himself from his reverie and raises an eyebrow. “What’s that?”

        He pulls the pebble from his lap and lays it flat on his hand for the other boy to look at. It’s blue green and glows but doesn’t burn like some. It casts the car in eerie light, and across from him, Minhyun looks inhuman in a way he rarely does these days.

        Seongwoo gives him the rock. “Keep it.”

        He wrinkles his nose. “It’s yours.”

        “Not anymore,” he says, and opens his palm. He curls Minhyun’s fingers around the rock, ignoring the searing warmth. “Keep it.”

 

++

 

        They don’t ask each other questions on Halloween anymore. There’s not much to ask about, but what little there is doesn’t seem as important, for some reason. Seongwoo keeps the notepad of questions, though. He sticks a page flag with a cartoon panda on the page between the questions he asked him and the questions he never will.

        He asks him one of the latter once and only once. The memory is impossible to forget—it flickers from a memory to a dream and back, and every time, it hurts a little bit more.

        Minhyun doesn’t let him lay on the roof with him—something about safety hazards and how breakable humans are. But he convinces him once, when his mother’s out of town and they’ve already gone through all the shitty weed Minhyun scored from his choir friends. Seongwoo thinks that his choir friends are involved in far more criminal activity than they have any right to, but forgets to tell him this soon after he hands him the joint.

        “We should go up,” he says, eyes glued on the ceiling like if he stares hard enough, the stars will appear above them. He doesn’t seem to register Seongwoo’s presence beside him. “To the roof.”

        “Isn’t it dangerous?” he returns. A quiet voice in the back of his head tells him that laying on the roof is far more dangerous when you’re inebriated. The same voice tells him that laying on the roof with Minhyun isn’t a good idea. He tells the voice to fuck off.

        Minhyun lifts his shoulder in a jerky, artless shrug. “Maybe. Probably. I’ll keep you safe.”

        Seongwoo fights the urge to laugh. Minhyun’s strong. Not that Seongwoo thinks about that a lot. But he doubts even he’s going to be able to keep him from sliding off the roof when he’s high too. He tells him so, and he raises his eyebrows. “I’m not high.”

        This time, Seongwoo does laugh. “You just—smoked all that, and you’re telling me not high. Dude. _Dude.”_

        Minhyun shakes his head, and although his gaze is vaguely faraway, he’s not entirely sure it’s due to the weed. “I’m really not. Dunno why. Stars and shit.”

        Seongwoo rubs his eyes. “Yeah, okay. The fuck does it matter, we’ll all die in the end. Let’s go up to the roof.”

        He claps a hand on his back and grins. “See, that’s the spirit.”

        So he takes him up the roof, and Seongwoo tells him half forgotten stories as they ascend the stairs. Minhyun laughs every time, even though none of them are particularly funny. Something about that sticks in his throat, but he ignores it. There’s no point to all of this if he can’t ignore this shit.

        Minhyun drags an old, musty blanket to the roof with them and spreads it over the tiles. The air hangs heavy with the cold. He suppresses a shiver, and Minhyun hands him his hoodie. Before he can protest, he kneels on the blanket and lays down. He glances back up at him. “I’m not cold.”

        Seongwoo wants to give it back. He does. He also wants to lay down and burrow into Minhyun’s chest and stay there forever. He heaves a sigh and lays down beside him.

        They sit there in silence for an eternity, and then some. Above them, the sky glitters and twirls, and Seongwoo thinks that without Minhyun, it looks _less._ He wonders what the night sky would’ve looked like, before. Whether his presence would’ve made a difference. He looks over at Minhyun and his lips curl in a small half smile. It would’ve. The surety of the knowledge stings. Suddenly, he feels listless in the stillness of the night.

        “Do stars fall in love?” he asks. It is less a question and more a confession. Minhyun looks over, wide eyed, and there is something foreign in the depths of his gaze. After eleven years, Seongwoo thinks that nothing about him is foreign to him. Except, maybe, if his lips are as soft as they look. Maybe that’s still foreign.

        Minhyun doesn’t answer for a moment. That strange, unfamiliar look does not leave him. He heaves a sigh and looks up at the sky instead. He combs through the stars like they’ll somehow have the answer—like he doesn’t, anymore.

        He closes his eyes, and his eyelashes are dark on the tops of his cheeks. The moonlight turns him nearly translucent. Seongwoo digs his nails into the slits of his ripped jeans.

        His voice is delicate, strained. “I don’t know. I think—I think they do.”

        This too, is less an answer and more a—Seongwoo isn’t sure. Just that it sticks in Minhyun’s throat when he speaks, and he swallows hard after he says it. Looks away for good measure.

        “Oh,” he says intelligently, and looks back up at the sky so he no longer has to look at Minhyun. But that’s one and the same, in a way. He sees Minhyun mirrored in the darkness, sees him mirrored in the bright, twinkling white.

        He closes his eyes, and sees him there too.

        Seongwoo hopes that he’s wrong. That stars can’t fall in love. It’s probably better like that. A lot of people fall in love with the stars. Not a lot of people fall in love with a star, singular, but—it’s not like they ever love them back.

        It’s better like this.

 

++

 

        Minhyun leaves on a Tuesday, and everything feels cyclical and tragic in a long lost sort of way. He tells him before, though, which should make it better. It doesn’t.

        Seongwoo’s sitting in a worn out beanbag in the corner of Minhyun’s room and reading a book Minhyun bought him for his birthday. School starts in a couple weeks, and he’s not sure he’ll have a lot of time to read between junior year and Minhyun.

        The other boy’s hanging off the side of his bed, so that he’s staring at Seongwoo from upside down. He looks up and catches his gaze, but he looks away quickly. There’s an air of anxiety in the air—Minhyun’s dangerously still on the bed, his phone abandoned near his pillow. The entire time he’d been reading—he’d just been looking at him. He’s not sure what to think of that.

        He looks different, upside down. Seongwoo pretends that the dimple between his chin and mouth hides a smoothed over eye.

        “I’m leaving,” he says quickly. Seongwoo drops his book. He picks it up again, slowly, and avoids Minhyun’s gaze.

        “What do you mean?” he says, carefully. He feels frayed and—hurt, maybe. Like that wide, expansive ache, that unlearning sting that had always lingered between them had grown teeth and promptly bitten down. Hard.

        Minhyun closes his eyes. From upside down, Seongwoo can’t read him. But that implies he did a good job at it in the first place. _Maybe if you could actually read him, you would’ve known this was coming._ He glances longingly at the half open window.

        “I’m—” he exhales slowly. “My mom’s sending me to study in Washington. My aunt lives there.” He gives a harsh, bitter kind of laugh. “No, not my aunt. My mom’s sister. Not that she’s my mom either.”

        He wants to ask, _Why?_ He asks, “For how long?”

        Minhyun shakes his head, and it’s impossible to discern the depth of his feelings—the intent of them. He presses two hands to his eyes. “I don’t know. The entire year, probably. Dunno about next year.”

        Seongwoo lets go of a breath he hadn’t been aware he’d been holding. It comes out shuddery and telling, overall. He places the book on his thighs and wills his heart to slow. It’s not like this is a surprise. He’d come to Earth to see things, and it’s not like Seongwoo and this shitty town are any good representation of all that the planet has to offer. And it’s not even his fault, really, but can he blame fate?

        He can. Teenage angst burns readily away in the pit of his stomach.

        Minhyun pulls himself up and turns around. He’s still not sure what he’s trying to convey—there’s something still, painfully neutral in his eyes, like he’s waiting, searching.  Seongwoo drags a hand through his hair and doesn’t look at him. “I’m happy for you.”

        Minhyun nods, and hesitates for a moment, and then nods again. “Yeah, I—It’ll be fun.” He sounds unsure, even now.

        “A new experience,” Seongwoo supplies. His head is throbbing. “When are you leaving?”

        Minhyun’s eyes are still empty, the wan light of his lamp turning him pale and unreadable. He can feel his warmth from the other side of the room. “Tuesday.”

        Seongwoo closes his eyes and—he wants to swear, but there’ll be time enough to do that later. He can feel the slip of time around them, viscous and dragging at their ankles.

        There is no time. _To do what?_ The urgency of it all presses at him again, worse this time. _There is no time,_ except maybe this is how it was all supposed to go and late-night fantasies are meant to stay that way.

        He takes a deep breath and puts his book on the ground. And then picks it up. “I’ll miss you.” It’s an understatement, and the depth of that hits them both at once.

        “We can Facetime.”

        “It’s not the same.”

        “Close as we’ll get,” he points out. There’s something nostalgically petulant about him tonight. Seongwoo prays he’ll stay the same, prays he’ll stay like this, even though he knows that change is inevitable. And he’s seen Minhyun change, it’s just—he isn’t sure he wants him to change without him around.

        Humans are flawed. He has a list, in his room, of all their different flaws. In case Minhyun ever needs it—needs a reality check. He adds a flaw to the list now. _Humans are selfish._

        Minhyun leaves on a Tuesday, and Seongwoo takes a picture of them before he leaves. He watches the car disappear in the distance and then goes home and prints out the picture six times and hangs it up three times in the room and three times in the tree house. No one is there to see the pictures but him, but if he squints just right, he can remember where Minhyun would’ve stood and seen them.

 

++

 

_[October 23, 2012]_

**minhyun** **_[8:45 P.M.]:_ ** do u want to facetime

 **seongwoo** **_[8:49 P.M.]:_ ** i have homework :/

 **minhyun** **_[8:50 P.M.]:_ ** what hw

 **seongwoo** **_[8:52 P.M.]:_ ** i have a test on grapes of wrath tmrw and i haven’t even read the book

 **minhyun** **_[8:53 P.M.]:_ ** sparknotes?

 **seongwoo** **_[8:53 P.M.]:_ ** crashed. schmoop too

 **minhyun** **_[8:54 P.M.]:_ ** ok

 **minhyun** **_[8:54 P.M.]:_ ** i’ll facetime u n u can read it out to me!! u’ll remember it better

 **seongwoo** **_[8:54 P.M.]:_ ** my throat will hurt

 **minhyun** **_[8:54 P.M.]:_ ** we can switch off i have my copy somewhere

 **seongwoo** **_[8:55 P.M.]:_ ** ok <3

 

++

 

_[December 25, 2012]_

**minhyun** **_[12:02 A.M.]:_ ** happy anniversary

 **seongwoo** **_[12:23 A.M.]:_ ** happy anniversary :))))))

 **minhyun** **_[4:56 P.M.]:_ ** are u free to watch something

 **seongwoo** **_[5:03 P.M.]:_ ** it’s christmas … yeah i’m free

 **minhyun [** ** _5:11 P.M.]:_**  https://lets.rabb.it/T348FHkf

 

++

 

_[May 17, 2013]_

**seongwoo** **_[3:45 A.M.]:_ ** did u know if two pieces of the same type of metal touch in space they get bonded and stuck together forever

 **minhyun** **_[3:52 A.M.]:_ ** it’s almost 4AM

 **seongwoo** **_[3:53 A.M.]:_ ** but did u know

 **minhyun** **_[3:54 A.M.]:_ ** i didn’t

 **minhyun** **_[3:54 A.M.]:_ ** thanks

 **minhyun** **_[3:54 A.M.]:_ ** now go to sleep

 **seongwoo** **_[3:55 A.M.]:_ ** ok sweet dreams

 **seongwoo** **_[3:55 A.M.]:_ ** do stars dream

 **minhyun** **_[4:12 A.M.]:_ ** sometimes

 

++

 

_[August 3, 2013]_

**seongwoo** **_[11:23 P.M.]:_ ** hlelo

 **seongwoo** **_[11:25 P.M.]:_ ** i menat

 **seongwoo** **_[11:27 P.M.]:_ ** h i e

 **seongwoo** **_[11:34 P.M.]:_ ** imshiu

 **seongwoo** **_[11:35 P.M.]:_ ** fcuk

 **seongwoo** **_[11:38 P.M.]:_ ** i mssu

 **minhyun** **_[11:43 P.M.]:_ ** seongwoo are u drunk

 **seongwoo** **_[11:45 P.M.]:_ ** noooooo

 **seongwoo** **_[11:46 P.M.]:_ ** jstu tipsu

 **minhyun** **_[11:47 P.M.]:_ ** u should drink water

 **minhyun** **_[11:48 P.M.]:_ ** and get some sleep

 **minhyun** **_[11:48 P.M.]:_ ** should i call ur sister

 **seongwoo** **_[11:49 P.M.]:_ ** nooooo im fime

 **minhyun** **_[11:53 P.M.]:_ ** i called her

 **seongwoo** **_[11:55 P.M.]:_ ** ://////////////////// i htae u

 **minhyun** **_[11:56 P.M.]:_ ** u don’t

 **seongwoo** **_[11:57 P.M.]:_ ** i DO

 **minhyun** **_[11:58 P.M.]:_ ** okay

 

++

 

_[November 12, 2013]_

**seongwoo** **_[10:45 P.M.]:_ ** do you want to rabbit

 **seongwoo** **_[10:45 P.M.]:_ ** i found a documentary on prairie dog society

 **minhyun** **_[1:34 A.M.]:_ ** sorry i was busy

 **seongwoo** **_[9:03 A.M.]:_ ** it’s fine

 

++

 

_[December 25, 2013]_

**minhyun** **_[12:34 A.M.]:_ ** happy anniversary

 **seongwoo** **_[11:02 P.M.]:_ ** happy anniversary

 

++

 

_[June 9, 2014]_

**seongwoo** **_[3:42 P.M.]:_ ** hey

 **minhyun** **_[3:42 P.M.]:_ ** [THIS NUMBER HAS BEEN DISCONNECTED.]

 

++

 

        Seongwoo attracts all celestial objects, with the exception of Minhyun.

        He calls the December of their freshman year in college, and Seongwoo almost deletes the messages off the answering machine. But he lets them play anyway, for a reason he doesn’t quite grasp.

 _“Hey,”_ he says, scratchy on the recording. It’s impossible to discern the nuances of how he’s changed with only that voice—it stings, knowing that they are too far away for these things to be clear. He almost deletes the message then and there. _“Sorry for calling when, like—I don’t know. Sorry for never calling. Sorry for calling now. Like, you’re completely within your rights to just. Stop listening right now. Not that I want you to, like, otherwise I wouldn’t have called at all, but like. Jesus. Can you delete messages after you’ve already started recording? Probably not. Just like, forget everything I just said, okay?_

        He doesn’t want to, but there’s another message recorded, so he lets that one play before freaking out.

 _“Hi,”_ he says, sheepish. Seongwoo is so tired of that sound; so in awe of it. _“Um, here’s the thing. I’m coming home for the weekend, because of—things. And like, I know you’re busy, doing shit. Being a functional human. But, you know. If you want, maybe we could hang out? And maybe you could give me a ride home from the train station? Mom’s still in Korea. Maybe, though. I can get a taxi. Or walk. I just figured—never mind. It’s, um, noon on Saturday. When the train arrives. Okay, I’m hanging up.”_

        Seongwoo presses his head against the kitchen wall and lets them play again. And again. And again. He considers not picking him up. He considers going to the beach on Saturday. He considers driving up to Washington right now and, just. Throwing caution to the wind. With every new idea, he replays the messages. By the time the sun comes up, he’s got them both memorized.

        The day Minhyun comes back, the sky is cloudless, which leads Seongwoo to believe that the night sky will be cloudless too. It feels fitting, and warms him in a strange, puerile way.

        It’s not that Seongwoo had consciously thought Minhyun impossible of change—he’s seen it himself. But this isn’t that subtle, aching change that’d pulled him from the sky. He’s just different, in an obvious, sharp edged way. The reality of it almost drives him from the platform. And then, of course, there’s the minor matter of all the different ways he’s changed.

Minhyun smiles at him from behind the thick glass, and he waves back, too preoccupied with his own ignorance to offer a satisfactory greeting. A woman’s neutral, bored voice fills the air, and the doors open.

        He crosses the distance between them easily, and then hesitates, centimeters away. This close, Seongwoo could hug him. He’s not sure whether he can, though, whether it’s allowed. His chest burns, an unknown, quiescent regret coming to life.

        In lieu of words, he takes Minhyun’s luggage from him and promptly sinks from the weight. Minhyun laughs, youthful and star-sharp, and takes it back. “I can carry it.”

        His cheeks burn. “I know, I just—never mind.”

        He starts off towards the car and after a brief laugh, Minhyun follows him. There’s that, at least. Seongwoo’s still an idiot, and Minhyun’s still, impossibly, charmed by it. He’ll never understand what he sees.

        Minhyun dutifully packs away the luggage and Seongwoo watches him, feeling distinctly out of place. The air feels charged, foreign. Minhyun’s eyes flick up and catch his, and he shoots him a small, warm smile. But even that’s vaguely unfamiliar, and so he turns on his heels again to go and start the car. A small part of him is desperate to be reassured that he’s still capable of simple tasks.

        But Minhyun grabs his arm before he can, faded heat wrapped loosely around his wrist. “Wait—” he shuts the trunk. “I’ll drive.”

        Seongwoo hesitates. “Aren’t you tired?”

        He shrugs. “Not really. And I owe you one.”

        Seongwoo’s not sure what he means by that, but he can tell the other’s not going to drop it. His stubbornness, at least, can always be counted on. He raises an eyebrow, as if inviting him to challenge him.

        He just shakes his head and sighs before handing over the keys. “Have fun trying to get her to start.”

        Minhyun grins, knowing, and just like that, he’s home. This town, dingy as it is, has always loved him, the same way Seongwoo does. An aged, heavy handed affection.

        He’d thought it would be easy, to fall out of love. _How arrogant he’d been._

        Minhyun gets the car to start on the first try, and there’s a cosmic _rightness_ to that that almost makes him laugh. The ride home is less awkward, but still noticeably, painfully different from what they were before. Minhyun watches the road and Seongwoo watches him, and some things do not change, even after two and a half years and confessions lost to an uncaring night sky.

        The lines of his face are foreign and yet achingly familiar—a dream he’s had a hundred times spit out again, but suddenly new, alien. There’s something sun-strained and careworn about him, and Seongwoo’s hit with it again—they do not know each other. Not entirely, not like before. He wonders, not for the first time, how long it takes to put together something smashed nine hundred and twelve times in just as many days. More than a weekend, probably. Probably.

        A small, blue-green pebble hangs on a cord around his neck. It still glows, even in the daylight. It still glows.

        “Sorry for the abruptness of it all,” Minhyun says quietly, knocking him from his reverie. He shoots him a nervous, sideways glance. “I meant to say before, I just—I don’t know. Forgot.”

        It’s a clear lie, and Seongwoo’s not sure what to say. He looks out the other window to avoid the intensity of Minhyun’s gaze. “It’s fine. I missed you.”

        The other boy—because that’s what he still is, to Seongwoo—sags in relief. It’s surprising, to say the least. He cards a hand through his hair and doesn’t say anything more until they reach the house.

        Minhyun drums his fingers on the dashboard, and Seongwoo watches him, and then the silence is all too much. He says, “Do you need help unpacking?”

        He shrugs. “Nah, I’m good.” Then he hesitates, and stills his fingers. “Are you free, tonight?”

        Seongwoo shakes his head slowly. The lie is bitter against his tongue. “No, I need to help my sister with something.”

        His expression shifts, barely, and he nods warmly. “Yeah, that’s to be expected. I’ll, um, call you later. Wait, you don’t—” he reaches forward to take Seongwoo’s phone from him, and scans the number briefly before typing in his own. _Minhyun,_ the contact name reads out, followed by at least six different kinds of hearts.

        “I broke my phone,” he says bashfully, passing a hand over the back of his neck. “End of last year. My baby cousin, he just like—smashed it. It was so bad, God.”

        The warmth in his voice is hard to miss. Seongwoo smiles without meaning to, and immediately regrets it. Minhyun blinks, and then smiles back. “Well, anyway. Give your sister my regards. I’ll—see you.”

        He says this carefully, and, in much the same manner, extracts himself from the driver’s seat and gathers his luggage before disappearing inside the house. Seongwoo sits in the passenger seat for a moment, and stares blankly at the spot he just vacated.

        _Fuck,_ he thinks. Then he says it out loud. It helps a little bit, so he repeats it on the way home, and by the time he pulls into the driveway, he is no longer sure of the definition of the word and no longer sure that matters.

        His sister blinks at him from the kitchen when he walks in. “I thought you were going to pick up Minhyun.”

        “I did.”

        She raises her eyebrows. “Like, pick him up and then spend the next fifteen days together with him in a blanket fort. Why are you home so early?”

        “I don’t know,” he says truthfully. He’s beginning to realize that he knows very little, and even within that embarrassingly small amount, barely any of it is about Minhyun. Maybe he changed, or maybe he didn’t know him in the first place. Maybe it was arrogant of him to assume a human could ever know a star.

        That night, he turns his phone on silent and hides it in the box with his rocks. He opens the window and turns on Adele and then he lies down on his bed and stares at the photos on his wall until he’s almost convinced himself that this means anything at all.

 

++

**minhyun** **❤** **️** **_[7:53 A.M.]:_** wakey wakey

 **seongwoo** **_[7:59 A.M.]:_ ** why are u awake at ass o’clock in the morning

 **seongwoo** **_[7:59 A.M.]:_ ** why are u WAKING ME UP at ass o’clock in the morning

 **minhyun** **❤** **️** **_[8:00 A.M.]:_** don’t be like that

 **minhyun** **❤** **️** **_[8:01 A.M.]:_** i’m driving over to your house :p i brought croissants :p and all the harry potter movies :p let me in or i’ll just stand out here all day

 **seongwoo** **_[8:06 A.M.]:_ ** u wouldn’t

 **minhyun** **❤** **️** **_[8:06 A.M.]:_** try me

 

        Seongwoo tries him, and so when he accidentally opens the door in a towel and nothing else, this is, admittedly, his fault. He can remember a time when Minhyun would’ve laughed and made crude jokes about it, but now he turns beet red, vermilion red, and turns to look at their neighbor’s lawn.

        “Are you done?” he asks carefully. Something about that angers him, but he can’t place what. He pulls on a sweatshirt and taps him on the shoulder in lieu of a response.

        He relaxes visibly, and slips past him and into the house. Here too, he is at home. Some days, it’s hard to believe that he’s not human—hard to believe that Seongwoo is the one who is supposed to belong.

        The weekend passes like this: Minhyun falls back into place, and Seongwoo falls back in love, and neither of these things are surprises but both of them hurt. A slow, dragging kind of ache that makes a mess of his internal organs and then leaves him to bleed out. It’s unbearable, and he’s sure he’s going to miss it, and that’s even more unbearable.

        A weekend is not enough—what they have is never enough. Seongwoo wonders whether time works differently in space, and wonders whether he and Minhyun can disappear into the stars and escape this entirely, and wonders whether they make Advil strong enough to make his self-induced headache disappear.

        “What are you thinking about?” Minhyun asks, on Sunday night—closer to Monday morning, if he’s being honest with himself.

        Seongwoo rolls over on the bed so they’re looking straight at each other. Minhyun’s right cheek is splayed against the wood of his bed frame—this close, the faint light of Seongwoo’s desk lamp casts him in shades of white gold. It’s not hard to believe that he’s made of stardust, at times like this.

        He wants to say, _I’m in love with you. Thought you should know._ He worries his lip. “When are you leaving?”

        Minhyun immediately stiffens. A thin, frenetic energy holds him taut, and now too, his past makes itself clear. _Some things,_ Seongwoo thinks, _are just meant to shine._ He deflates, suddenly weary. “An hour and a half.”

        His lips part, shock turning him to stone. Thoughts coalesce and evanesce in the next moment—he’s not sure what to say, so he doesn’t say anything. But Minhyun waits, and finally, the silence is too much. He presses his palms to his eyes and forces himself to speak. “Why didn’t you—when were you going to leave?”

        “In an hour,” he says easily. Seongwoo wants to bang his head against his wall, and just barely restrains himself. “Don’t freak out.”

        “I’m not freaking out.” He’s freaking out.

        Minhyun reaches out a hand, lets it fall in the crook between his collarbone and jugular. It’s meant to be soothing, probably. Probably. Seongwoo’s heart is a creature fashioned out of gasoline and flash paper. Minhyun moves his thumb in a single circle, and he closes his eyes for a moment.

        “It’s not that late,” he says, after the moment passes. There’s something distinctly unfamiliar in the timbre of his voice, and he clears his throat. “I wasn’t going to be late.”

        “You might’ve been. It’s _an hour away._ ”

        “Twenty-five minutes in the middle of the night. I _wasn’t_ ,” he insists, and drops his hand from his chest. The warmth dissipates, and almost immediately, Seongwoo yearns for it again. He passes a hand over his face. “It’s—I’ll just leave now, it’s fine.”

        “I’ll come with you,” Seongwoo says, pulling himself up with one half asleep arm. And a tiny voice tells him maybe he shouldn’t—maybe it’ll hurt less if he just watches Minhyun drive off the distance, and lets it end like it does every time.

        But there’s no one to drive him there, and Seongwoo is only human. Minhyun scans him, hesitant and searching. For a moment, he thinks he’ll refuse. But his mouth just twists wryly. “Okay.”

        The Volkswagen breaks down three fourths of the way there, on the side of the highway, and the thing is that the emptiness of this asphalt world means that there’s no one to honk at and no one to save them. Minhyun leans against the cement and looks up at the dark, clear sky, wistful. Seongwoo grits his teeth. “You’re going to miss your train.”

        He shrugs. “Maybe.”

        “Do you even want to catch it?” The words are delivered with all the precise, fast acting venom that humanity has so carefully cultivated. It has an air of sick rightness; the stars are good at shining, and humans are good at hurting.

        Minhyun holds his gaze, and in the moonlight, he could be the same boy Seongwoo found in the field all those years ago. Beautiful; cold; _other._

        Except he isn’t. He doesn’t look away. “Do you want me to?”

        He doesn’t, but he doesn’t say this. Seongwoo can never say these things, can only write them in his notepad in shuddery, rushed script, and dream of a day when he can. So he just shakes his head noncommittally and shuts the car door. “I guess we’re walking then.”

        Minhyun watches him for a moment more and then pushes off the cement railing. They walk in silence and watch the world fall asleep around them. Seongwoo swallows his desires and clenches his hands into familiar fists.

        “I missed you too, you know,” Minhyun says conversationally. In the distance, a bright green road sign advertises an Arby’s in two and a half miles. He doesn’t look at him when he says it, face half tilted up to the sky. There’s something iridescent and electric about the way he looks at the stars. Seongwoo wishes he had his camera.

        “You did?” he asks, which is not what he had meant to ask, but. It’s nearly five, and Seongwoo’s never been good at saying what he wants around Minhyun.

        Minhyun cocks his head, and a lock of hair falls into his eyes. “Why wouldn’t I?”

        Panic makes his movements jerky. He shrugs. “I just—I didn’t think—I don’t—” he looks away. “Forget about it.”

        “I don’t want to.”

        “I do,” he says, and meets his gaze again. “Doesn’t that count for anything?”

        A muscle jumps in his jaw. It’s unreasonably attractive, but under the heat of irrational anger, Seongwoo’s far too tired to appreciate it. They pass the Arby’s and continue on and the feral night is quiet around them.

        Minhyun abruptly stops, and Seongwoo almost walks into him. He stills himself millimeters away, and takes a deep breath. He pulls himself away and glances up at Minhyun. His expression is strained, thinly veiled weariness and a hint of something unreadable.

        He says, “I can walk from here.”

        Seongwoo closes his eyes. _There is no time. There is no time. There is no—_ “Oh.”

        Minhyun presses his lips into a thin line and nods, but still, they do not move.

        Words are laid out between them, waiting. The sepia toned perfection of it all is almost suffocating; everything about this is meant for an old, rotting photo album made up entirely of memories between two drifting souls.

        This is when it ends. This is when they finally let go of this threadbare, star-spun excuse for a friendship.

        But he can’t move. Figures. He can never do anything when it really matters.

        Minhyun opens his mouth to say something, and closes it—the sharp, clean planes of his face are suddenly tight with nerves. Quietly, he asks, “Do you have those dreams anymore? Of—when I fell?”

        Seongwoo exhales. “Every night.”

        And that’s enough, somehow. Minhyun’s eyes go wide, and the tiny voice of rationality in Seongwoo’s brain goes quiet, and _there is no time._ He braces himself against his own stupidity and reaches up.

        It’s a careless, fluid movement—half of all the neurons still awake are screaming for him to _go,_ and the other half are screaming for him to _jump off the overpass._ But his head is a buzz, all white noise and badly worded love letters, so he ignores it all and presses his lips to Minhyun’s, briefly.

        He pulls back quickly, already hyperaware of his own impulsive stupidity. But underneath it all, he can’t help but think, _His lips_ are _soft._

Minhyun isn’t looking at him when he glances up—his gaze is loosely fixed on Seongwoo’s face, but his eyes are faraway. He swallows, hard, and thinks, _Fuck it._ There is no point to confessing if there are no neon posters and no boxes of saccharine chocolate and no montages of summer-sweet days spent together. He has none of these things, but they’re too close to leave it here now.

        He’s shaking, slightly. He takes Minhyun’s hands in his to calm himself. It has the adverse effect which, in all honesty, he should’ve known.

        Seongwoo tightens his grip around his hands and looks up. Minhyun’s gaze focuses, and it’s almost unbearable, but everything about this is a different shade of impossible, a different shade of pain, and at this point, he’s running on adrenaline and just waiting for it all to kick in.

        He whispers, “Don’t leave.”

        Minhyun stares. He stares and stares and stares, and Seongwoo wonders, if he cut him right then, whether he would bleed silver or red.

        The moon burns into them. The stars have never felt so callous, have never felt so callow.

        Minhyun exhales, and it’s impossibly slow, the dry night air drawing it from him. He says, “Okay.”

        Seongwoo blinks at him. “What?”

        He takes another deep breath, and runs a hand through his hair. “I said, okay. I’ll stay.”

        Panic bubbles to life in his throat. “But—your train—”

        “I don’t care about the train.”

        “What about Washington? What about classes? What about—things?” He’s running out of ways to self-sabotage—he can see the train wreck of his own dignity beginning to form in the distance.

        His laugh is a little sad, a little bright. “Washington has a lot of things. It doesn’t have you.”

        Seongwoo’s brain is three complete thoughts from giving up on him entirely. “But it has other things.” Truthfully, he hadn’t thought this far ahead.

        Minhyun takes his hands in his again, and squeezes once. “I wanted to come back here for school, but, um. My aunt got sick, and it’s—it’s strange, because maybe it shouldn’t have mattered to me. Since I magicked my way into this family and all—maybe it shouldn’t have mattered. But, I don’t know. I knew I had to stay, and that was the end of that.” He’s rambling now, kind of, and Seongwoo’s still catatonic, and there’s a strange, sad balance in that. He flicks his eyes up and catches Seongwoo’s. “I meant to come back.”

        He says these words very slowly, very carefully. Seongwoo is struck suddenly by the irony of it. _You’re finally human,_ he thinks. _That ugly, twist of fate that catches us sometimes—you’re finally human._ The pupil becomes the master, and all of that—it’s impossible to unsee it. Seongwoo blows out a breath and says, “So what about your aunt? You have to go back for her.”

        Minhyun tilts his head in a strange, not quite human gesture. “I wouldn’t have come if I had to go back.” Catching the surprise on his face, he adds, “She’s better, now. And my mother’s with her. Surprise, she’s back from Korea.”

        “You’re good at lying,” Seongwoo notes. His voice is vaguely strangled.

        “You’re bad at discerning which’s which,” he returns. Seongwoo thinks this is probably more accurate.

        His voice sounds foreign to his own ears. “But—the things. What about school?”

        Minhyun pats a bag. “Transfer papers. But, um. If you hadn’t—I probably would’ve just gone back.”

        “Oh,” he says again. Two more thoughts left. “So—you. And I. We. You like me?”

        He gives him another strange, knowing look, and then dips down and kisses him again. Fireworks crackle in his head. He pulls back, smug. “Yes.”

        “Oh,” he says, slightly more breathless this time. “You’re staying?”

        “Yes.”

        “Oh.”

        They walk back to Seongwoo’s car in silence, but he presses himself closer to Minhyun. The tiny voice of rationality has found itself again, and it informs him haughtily that this is only a necessary defense against the winter air. Another, sleepier, voice points out that it doesn’t matter—he no longer needs an excuse to touch him.

        Seongwoo feels electric. He wonders whether this is how stars feel, and then wonders why they would ever fall.

        Minhyun takes his hand, and the question is resolved. They pause in front of the car; Seongwoo leans back against the dew wet metal and glances up at him. In the distance, the sky is lightening.

        “Did you ever want me to stay?” he asks Seongwoo, and it holds entire universes. A hundred different instances in high school flash through his brain—and then run back further. The truth of it is bright and jagged in his chest—for once, it doesn’t cut.

        “Yes,” he says. “Every time.”

 

++

 

        Stars are still; they are anchored in space, tied to a single, fixed point. Minhyun shines, and Minhyun bleeds, and Seongwoo thinks that maybe stars and humans are not all that different after all.

 

++

 

        “Do you ever want to go back?” he asks. They’re lying in the middle of the field, on the outskirts of town. The golden grass itches against Seongwoo’s bare shins, but the moonlight turns everything to silver and white, so he bears it. The field is smaller now, he thinks, but maybe that’s just because they’re no longer fun-sized and trapped in hand me down overalls.

        Minhyun turns to look at him, head propped up by one slender elbow. He cocks it. “Back to the stars?” Seongwoo nods and he makes a considering noise. “With or without you?”

        Even after weeks, after months, he is still flustered—this, too, is a fixed point. “I mean—with me, I guess.”

        He grins, crooked and bright. “Then, yeah. I do want to go back, sometimes. To show you everything.”

        The hushed, rustling silence of the night makes him brave, suddenly. He reaches out a hand, pinky outstretched. “Promise me.”

        Minhyun stares at his finger for a moment, then at him, then back. Then something shifts in his expression, clicks into place. He smiles again, youthful and yet ageless, and wraps his pinky around Seongwoo’s. “I promise.”

        Above them, the sky streaks with white gold and crackles with magic. The air smells of burnt sugar and smoke and rosewater, vaguely.

        It’s just like that night, a dream and a nightmare and a miracle, all in one. But Seongwoo no longer looks to the night sky for his miracles, hands held palm up in awe stained veneration.

        He looks over at Minhyun, and finds him already staring. _There are some miracles,_ he thinks, _that linger on Earth and wait for you to find them._

        Seongwoo takes Minhyun’s hand and looks back at the stars and imagines, for a moment, what they would look like with Minhyun among them.

 

++

 

        Minhyun is a star and a human and the best of both, and above all, he keeps his promises. One day, he takes Seongwoo to the stars, and the cold is almost unbearable. But Seongwoo thinks that maybe he’s right—the stars are more beautiful from space, but not as much as they are once they’ve fallen.  

**Author's Note:**

> i hope u liked it!! leave a comment/kudos if u want and here's my [twt](https://twitter.com/hwanguIt) and [cc](https://curiouscat.me/sarchengsey) !!!
> 
> funny sidenote: i did try to add six heart emojis to minhyuns contact name but that ended in ao3 screaming at me and me almost not being able to upload this at all so just.. Imagine they're there


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